1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information systems and data centers.
2. Description of Related Art
Large companies and other enterprises may have multiple information systems and data centers that they use to conduct their business. For example, carriers who provide phone and Internet-related services will generally have multiple geographically-dispersed data centers to cover their service area. These enterprises may be running a variety of different services including voice transmission, e-mail, Internet access, messaging, video streaming, and the like, using networks, servers and storage systems provided by the data centers. Thus, the effective and efficient use of resources such as the networks, servers and storage systems in these data centers is necessary for the successful operation of these enterprises.
Recently, virtualization of networks, servers and storage has increased the efficiency with which data centers can be operated. For example, server virtualization is a technology that enables server consolidation in certain information system arrangements, such as at data centers, by allowing single physical servers to provide a plurality of virtual server environments using virtual machine software. Under this technology, one or more physical servers can be divided into multiple virtual server environments instead of having multiple dedicated physical servers, each running a different server environment. Further, virtual machine software is also able to combine several physical servers to create a single virtual server. Server virtualization can be used to eliminate the requirement for having a large number of different physical servers in a data center, and thereby enable more efficient use of server resources, while improving server availability. Also, server virtualization can help reduce overall costs, reduce power consumption, reduce time for server provisioning, centralize server management and administration, assist in agile service deployment and improve disaster recovery capabilities.
Virtualization technology allows the data center management to change the system configuration dynamically in order to improve performance of applications running in a data center. Furthermore, migration of an application between data centers that are distributed over a wide area can be carried out by forwarding the data which is necessary for running an application. However, problems currently exist for resource provisioning to enable application migration between environments including geographically-dispersed data centers. For example, it is difficult to find an appropriate target data center to which to migrate an application while maintaining the same performance as before the migration because applications typically utilize multiple layers of different technologies including networks, servers and storages. In particular, network devices, server devices and storage devices which are used to operate an application may be different at every data center, and determining available capacity of these devices is not always possible. Therefore, the application may not operate at the same level of performance when operation of the application is moved from a first data center to a different data center. In addition, even when an application can be migrated to the other data center and maintain the same level of performance, the migration may affect the performance of other applications running in the targeted data center. Existing methods are just able to carry out a configuration change within the data center for performance improvement after the applications are migrated.
Related art includes U.S. Pat. No. 7,099,912, to Ishizaki et al., entitled “Integrated Service management system”; U.S. Pat. No. 7,062,559, to Yoshimura et al., entitled “Computer Resource Allocating Method”; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/892,045, to Oeda, filed Aug. 20, 2007, entitled “Storage and Service Provisioning for Virtualized and Geographically Dispersed Data Centers”, the entire disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.